Another Bulls--t Night in Suck City: Lawmakers Disagree in Their Usual Ways about Obama's State of the Union

Underneath burgundy drapes, marble and bronze statues and the hot lights of an innumerable camera crews, Washington’s leaders walked a red carpet. First came the administration officials and Supreme Court Justices and then comes Congress, if less smoothly—Speaker John Boehner tried to cut into one of the rope lines cordoning off journalists and nearly got trapped there. Majority Leader Eric Cantor walked with a phalanx of aides in tow. Whip Kevin McCarthy entered with Renee Ellmers, one of leadership’s favorite freshmen. Another State of the Union.

Roughly half of the lawmakers had agreed to sit with members of the opposing party, a mostly meaningless show of bipartisan comity that began with good intentions in the days following Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ shooting. No Labels kept track of which lawmakers were sitting together, and made an admirable attempt to find common ground—Senators Scott Brown and Tom Carper, for example, appear to be sitting together because they’re great at making steeples out of their fingers. Reps Michael Grimm and Loretta Sanchez are co-chairs of the Congressional Morocco Caucus. Whatever works, right?

After Obama finished, Capitol police unleashed a horde of staffers hanging out just below the Rotunda, in the Crypt, and the congressmen and officials who wanted to give interviews (they are legion) filed out of the House chamber to meet them in Statuary Hall. Reporters buzzed around the lawmakers, who lined up for television hits, glad-handed their colleagues, and did radio interviews on their cell phones, or at least pretended to. The fake-cell-phone-interview reporter-dodge is a time-honored tradition mastered by every senator from Scott Brown to now Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

(As an aside, my favorite person at these things was Anthony Weiner. I remember him walking around one time, going, "Why do you guys even talk to other reporters? I give you your money shot and then you go home.")

It had been a classic Obama speech. He threw in ideas that should have appealed to Republicans ("Take the money we’re no longer spending at war, use half of it to pay down our debt, and use the rest to do some nation-building right here at home,") and drilled down on fundamentals ("Tax reform should follow the Buffett rule: If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in tas"). But in a town where bipartisanship is so rare that a meal between lawmakers of opposing parties almost always merits a news story, the State of the Union had a house of mirrors effect, and everyone saw what they wanted.

"Besides that it’s cynical class warfare playing on humanity’s darkest emotions?," one GOP aide said when I asked what he thought of the speech. Another Republican, Rep. Raúl Labrador, told me he was just happy it was the last State of the Union he’d see Obama deliver.

Democrats saw something else entirely. "I didn’t think it was partisan," said Rep. Pete Welch, a House Democrat from Vermont who’s trying his best to work on bipartisan issues even though he’s a progressive Democrat. "They just hate Obama. It’s unbelievable. But I thought it was a very good and shrewd speech. We are dysfunctional. Members from both sides. We’re failing every day as an institution; we know it. People bitching about his speech just sort of reinforce it."

Some have bemoaned the deteriorating Washington social scene—lawmakers frequently travel home on weekends and rarely hang out with one another—as part of the reason why they can’t get along. I asked a few if they had plans to celebrate with their colleagues after, but there was little time for partying. They were too busy delivering responses and preparing for early-morning news hits. As the night dragged on, they tweeted photos of each other working the phones post-address.